The old red freestone cathedral, built in the time of the Saxons, where sleeps Dr. Paley, once archdeacon, and where is a monument erected to his memory, claimed a modicum of our time, after which we passed through Newcastle-on-Tyne, celebrated, as all know in these modern days, as a port of shipment for coal, and busy with its glass-houses, potteries, iron and steel factories, and machine shops, and owing its name to the fact that Robert, son of William the Conqueror, built a new castle here after his return from a military expedition. The old donjon keep and tower still stand, massive and blackened, not with the smoke of battle, but of modern industry, which rises, in murky volumes, from many chimneys.
On we speed, leaving Newcastle, its dingy buildings and murky cloud, behind, and whirl over the railroad, till we reach the beautiful vale that holds the "Metropolis of the North of England," as the guide-books style it,—the ancient city of York,—with its Roman walls, and its magnificent minster; a city, which, A. D. 150, was one of the greatest of the Roman stations in England, and had a regular government, an imperial palace, and a tribunal within its walls. York, which carries us back to school-boy days, when we studied of the wars of the Roses, and the houses of York and Lancaster—York, whose modern namesake, more than seventeen hundred years its junior, in the New World, has seventeen times its population.
York—yes, in York one feels that he is in Old England indeed. Here are the old walls, still strong and massy, that have echoed to the tramp of the Roman legions, that looked down on Adrian and Constantine the Great, that have successively been manned by Britons, Picts, Danes, and Saxons, the latter under the command of Hengist, mentioned in the story-legends that tell of the pair of warlike Saxon brothers, Hengist and Horsa, the latter, whose name in my youthful days always seemed to have some mysterious connection with the great white-horse banner of the Saxon warriors, that was wont to float from the masts of their war ships.
It was in York that the first Christmas was ever kept in England. This was done by King Arthur and his nobility when he began to rebuild the churches, in the year 500, that the Saxons had destroyed.
York was once a place where many Jews dwelt. We all remember Isaac of York, in the story of Ivanhoe; and the great massacre of this people there in 1490, when over two thousand fell victims to popular fury.
But I am not going to give a chronological history of this interesting city, for there is scarcely an American reader of English history but will recall a score of noteworthy events that have occurred within its ancient walls.
The great and crowning wonder here to the tourist is, of course, the cathedral, or the minster, as it is called. This magnificent and stupendous pile, which occupied nearly two hundred years in erection, and has stood for three hundred years since its completion, is, without doubt, one of the most magnificent Gothic structures in the world, and excels in beauty and magnificence most ecclesiastical buildings of the middle ages. After a walk through a quaint old quarter of the city, and a stroll on the parapets of the great wall, through some of the gates, with the round, solid watch-towers above them, pierced with arrow-slits for crossbowmen, or having, high above, little turrets for sentinels, I was in the mood for the sight of the grand old cathedral, but not at all prepared for the superb and elegant proportions of the pile which suddenly appeared to view, as I turned a corner of a street.
The length of this majestic pile is five hundred and twenty-four feet, and its breadth two hundred and twenty-two, and the height of its two square and massive towers one hundred and ninety-six feet. I got a west view of the building first, which is what I should suppose was properly its front, consisting of the two tall square towers, with the main entrance between them, surmounted by a great Gothic window, exhibiting a magnificent specimen of the leafy and fairy-like tracery of the fourteenth century. Tall, pointed arches are above it, and the two towers are also adorned with windows, and elaborate ornamentation. To the rear of them, at the end of the nave and between the two transepts, rises the central tower two hundred and thirteen feet. There is a fine open space in front of this glorious west front, and no lover of architecture can come upon it for the first time without standing entranced at the wondrous beauty of the building in proportion, decoration, and design.
Churches occupied the site of York Cathedral centuries before it. One was built here by King Edwin, in 627; another in 767, which stood till 1069; but the present building was founded in 1171, and completed in the year 1400.
The expectations created by an external view of its architectural grandeur and rich embellishments are surpassed upon an examination of the interior, a particular description of which would require almost a volume to give space to. We can only, therefore, take a glance at it.